A couple of weeks ago I saved a groundhog from drowning. I later found out his name was Sidney.

I have an irrationally deep affection for rodents. In fact, if I were to be granted the proverbial three wishes, I’d definitely blow one on conjuring a trained rat as big as a horse — complete with specialty harness, reins, and saddle — so that I could ride around on it and take it places. It’d be just great.

So when I saw a member of Order Rodentia swimming desperate circles around my swimming pool . . . well, I broke my long-standing agreement with myself never to run anywhere and positively flew to his side. And just as I got to him to scoop him out (with a pool net) the exhausted marmot had stopped struggling, floating face-down in the water.

But Sidney’s travail was to have a happy ending. Though he remained motionless on the concrete where I sat him for a solid five minutes, not even bothering to tuck his leg into a more comfortable position, he was at least breathing. I wiped some of the foam off of him (air in the pool filter created a foamy surface which may have actually fooled Sidney into thinking the water was solid ground) and sat by his side lest a dog, fox, or smilodon snatch him up for a treat. I can only imagine how thrilled he was to transition from the terror of almost-drowning to the dread of lying helpless next to a hairless ape not even native to his hemisphere. When he started showing some inkling of getting his energy back, I returned him to the bushes where I knew he had a burrow and he scooted under cover.

He’s fine now, no residual effects, I see him all the time and he shows his gratitude by running away from me as fast as he can. I’m happy to say he hasn’t gone for another swim.

But, and here’s the point I’m getting to, the only reason I was able to play hero to a rotund and tailess rat was because I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing that day. I wasn’t at the computer, writing, blogging, or reviewing. I wasn’t reading. I didn’t go to the library to work, like I told myself I would the night before. I wasn’t even doing any work around the house. Instead, I was taking a break from procrastinating to eat an orange, and the only reason I happened to notice a member of one of my favorite orders of small mammals in trouble was because I was washing my hands at the kitchen sink and chanced to look outside.

A more regimented and focused individual would have been hoisting a sodden and bloated woodchuck corpse from his pool that evening, and wondering just how far he could chuck the woodchuck chuck into the trees. He also would no longer have the pleasure of looking outside and watching Sidney waddle determinedly around the yard on his vegetarian errands. And, as I say, I have an irrationally deep affection for rodents, so a bad end to this particular tale would not have rested as easily with me as it might have another.

Is the moral of the story, then, that slacking off is good? Or that chance rules all? Or, is it perhaps what I secretly suspected all along, that true stories have no moral?

I doubt Sidney cares.

Over at BG this week I’ve more or less reviewed a short story by Charles R. Saunders that he has posted for free over at his site (in the blog section). ‘Luendi’ is a great Weird Tales style piece, told with Saunders’ customary vigor and style, that takes us to 1890’s South Africa and the enslaved people of ‘Azungaland.’ Piet van Brug, adventurer and scoundrel, is the would-be King of this previously unknown people, and works them cruelly in the diamond mine that is the source of their suffering.

But the Azunga are not without power of their own, and the drums that sound in the night have van Brug feeling uneasy . . .

Fans of Saunders shouldn’t miss this — and let’s hope ‘Luendi’ is the start of a trend that will have some more hard-to-find pieces from this contemporary master make an appearance.

Thanks. As you may or may not know, I have Amazon Affiliate links on this site in the vain hope of at least getting a few Amazon gift certificates out of my blog from time to time. The way the program works is that I get a percentage of any sale that Amazon makes when one of my links takes the buyer to the Amazon site. In the grand history of my site, I’ve made around two dollars this way — which doesn’t even qualify for Amazon’s threshold for a pay out.

So I was shocked to see $29.99 on my Amazon Affiliate statement for this month — somebody, somebody wonderful, followed one of my links to Amazon and ended up buying a three hundred dollar Kindle 2. So thanks, anonymous link-follower, whoever you may be. Hope you enjoy your e-reader.

(And for the record, I have no idea why I got 10% of the sale, normally the percentage is like 4%. Maybe it’s just a way to push the Kindle. Whatever it is, I’m not complaining.)

This does remind me of the larger issue of advertising on this blog — or “monetizing” it –  which admittedly has a certain appeal. The most I’ll ever do in conjunction with the Amazon Affiliate links and sidebars is perhaps a banner ad at the top. I don’t get enough traffic to bother much with it at this point, but I just wanted to state that if I ever did I’d fight the urge to go too far. Google ads, ad links in the body of the text, and a bunch of crap on the sidebar area  are a big turn off, and end up putting the money before the message and turning a personal site into a hawker’s bazaar.

Of course, if you want to follow one of my links to Amazon and buy a Kindle, plasma TV, or a fully-assembled and delivered log cabin please feel free . . .

Over at Black Gate — which I have been absent from for a few weeks — I’ve posted a little news item about the first-ever winner of the David Gemmell Legend Award (which I also talked about on this blog), Andrezej Sapkowski. Yes, I had never heard of him either, but I couldn’t be happier than to see the award go to an author who, despite being a best-seller for at least a decade in his native Poland, is only just now breaking through the translation barriers to arrive on US and UK store shelves.

Having not read him, I can’t comment on the thematic parallels between Sapkowski and Gemmell, but I do know that Gemmell’s work faced a kind of barrier in leaping the Atlantic to break into US release.

Nice to see the award and the fan vote prove out in such a surprising and interesting way, and I think I might just pick up a copy of the winning novel, Blood of Elves, next time I’m at the bookstore.

For me, June has been a month of getting nothing done. Seemingly everything in my life, from writing to keeping up the house, seems unfinished — the lone exception to that being cases of Yuengling, of which I’ve finished two.  On the book front I’ve finished six, though one of those is a graphic novel and I have a hard time thinking of those as really counting.

But hey — I did read Dan Simmons’s Drood, which could crush a car if you dropped it from a highrise, so that counts as two books. Of course, I’ve yet to finish my review of the book (spoiler: it’s excellent), so that’s another tick in the ’slacking off’ column of this month’s tally. Along with, and in preparation for, Drood, I finished Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which I started last month (actually, last year, but I challenge you to prove it to the satisfaction of a jury). But how do I count finishing an unfinished novel? See, even Dickens isn’t getting things done in June (a month that, as a matter of fact, figures prominently and ominously in Drood — and now you can see we have come full circle).

Beyond things Droodish we have things Egyptian — Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Sidon, to be exact. Picking up the story of perpetual amnesiac Latro after some time has passed following the close of Soldier of Arete, Soldier of Sidon moves the action to ancient Egypt with a trip down the Nile. Fans of the series know what to expect — gods, visions, an unreliable narrator, and Wolfe’s delicious ambiguity. Not my favorite of the series — the books set in Greece feel much more solidly realized and contain more that is interesting to me — but good nonetheless. The book begs a sequel.

Beyond those books, and in amongst the myriad anthologies I’m inching my way through — including two that I appear in, The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008 and Northern Haunts — I’ve managed to grab some time for non-fiction. I highly recommend Theodora Kroeber’s biography of the last ‘wild’ Indian of North America, Ishi in Two Worlds. In 1911 Ishi, a Yahi Indian, came down out of the North California hills after a lifetime of secrecy and privation. He entered the white man’s world, and soon adjusted remarkably to life amongst academics and staff at the University of California’s Museum of Anthropology, in San Francisco. The book is a fascinating look not just the culture of the Yahi, but at Ishi’s adjustment to his radically new environment. More than just a work of anthropology, this is a true biography, and Ishi is revealed as an individual and not merely a type or representative of tribal man.

Following a recommendation of a friend of mine, I picked up Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Bryson is a travel writer and humorist, and his attempt to hike the Appalachian trail as described in A Walk in the Woods is at turns profoundly interesting and laugh-out-loud hilarious. Bryson, accompanied by a old friend who seems a magnet for trouble, experiences the trail life at its best and worst, on the way encountering odd people, places beautiful and strange, and wildlife most of us have not seen outside a nature documentary. What he gains is a new sense of the vastness and grandeur of the American wilderness, and a new appraisal of his own character as well. The book really made me want to go hike or camp — until I remembered Lyme disease, bear attacks, and hypothermia. Regardless, I’ll definitely be getting some more by Bryson in the future.

Even though the UK’s Murky Depths #8 is out already, I’m just now getting caught up with #7. Everything I said about this magazine in my review of Murky Depths #5 applies in spades to this issue — edgy content, handy format, and super-slick presentation and design. If there were more magazines that looked like this on store shelves we might all be singing a different tune when it comes to the future of short fiction print venues.

Murky Depths has strong shelf appeal — and that always starts with a good looking cover. This issue has one of my favorites, a biplane confronting some strange, colossal creature; and the first feature of the magazine is an interview with the artist behind the image, Chris Moore. Many artists are featured in this issue, which includes a section of biographies of artists and illustrators involved in past and future issues of the magazine. That, combined with the excellent level of interior illustrations and graphic features, make Murky Depths a real feast for the eyes.

Comic strips include “Flashback” from regular Murky contributor Luke Cooper, and James Johnson and Leoanrd M. Giron’s “A Brief History of Dogfighting,” which treats us to an escalation of aerial combat technology from the first thrown brick in WWI to biogenic craft fighting in deep space. My favorite is probably the darkly weird “Bite the Bullet,” again from James Johnson with art by Denis Packer, which shows us what happens when a man literally eats his gun.

There is some strong fiction in this issue. One of my favorites was “Scratch” by Jason Palmer, a story of a nasty future in which an irresistible itching disorder — which tends to result in people scratching whole limbs off — has infected the human race.  Other standouts in a very good mix of stories include Willie Meikle’s fractured “Viewer’s Choice,” the mysterious epistolary tale “The Longest Road in the Universe” from C.S. MacCath, and the gritty flash piece “Survivalist” by Kevin Brown. My own flash fiction piece “A Healthy Outlook” is in there, too, accompanied by a very cool illustration from Ricky Martin.

For a more in depth review of this issue have a look at Gareth D. Jones’ review over at SF Crowsnest.

Nice to have a good newsie sort of follow up to my sky-is-falling recent post on Vanishing Print Zines. Seems Jason Sizemore over at Apex just doesn’t want to let his monster die, so he’s pumping it full of electricity and letting it loose on the world once more. Apex Magazine, a pro-rate market, will return on July 6th, and it will also reopen to submissions on the first of that month.

Why and how is Apex making the return? Check out Jason’s complete post over at the Apex site, where he explains he’s got a better revenue plan. He also mentions Apex will be available as a POD product, which satisfies us print snobs. Personally, I’m excited at the prospect, as this is a magazine I’ve followed almost from its inception, and I’ve seen Jason and co. pull off some impressive stunts in the past to keep the magazine and press in good health.

If you want to help Apex survive, consider doing what I just did and buy a copy of Descended From Darkness, Apex Magazine’s first ‘Best Of’ anthology.

A few years ago the great short fiction review site Tangent Online ran into some trouble, and had to close. I doubt many of us that read it at the time really expected it to come back after so long, but Dave Trusedale, the organizing force behind Tangent, never gave up. One look at the new site is proof that his persistence was worth it and that this zine — which has been on the web covering the short fiction scene since 1997 — is back and better than ever.

Tangent is still focused reviewing genre magazine and anthology short fiction, but it’s got a new look, new contributors, and a whole new crop of reviews to kick things off. A site like this is a great way to keep tabs on what’s going on in the world of short fiction, and a good way, too, to maybe discover new authors or magazines that might prove to be the sort of thing you’d want to subscribe to.

Two of my own reviews, of issues nine and ten of Black Static magazine, are part of the new line up fresh material over at the site, but there are also reviews of all the biggest magazines published this year. But the site isn’t just about reviews — articles, interviews, and editorials round out its coverage of the short fiction scene. Well worth checking out.